Why preseason 49ers crowds can turn dangerous

SCRAMBLING TO KEEP FANS SAFE

Gwen Knapp

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Jed York, the 49ers' co-owner and team president, called the violent episodes at Candlestick on Saturday night "one-off events." Greg Suhr, San Francisco's police chief and a longtime 49ers fan, called the level of criminal behavior at the exhibition against the Raiders an aberration.

"This game was like no other that I can remember," the chief said after citing the tally of arrests, ejections and medical calls from an evening that, at its worst, yielded two shootings and a restroom assault that hospitalized three men.

York and Suhr appeared at a news conference Monday at Candlestick, trying to spread some calm and sunshine after what they and Mayor Ed Lee portrayed as a perfect storm. No one in authority seemed ready to contemplate the possibility that San Francisco and the 49ers have undergone a climate change, which can't be resolved by telling the Raiders to stay on their side of the bay.

The authorities saw the local rivalry as Saturday's main storm cloud, compounded by the 5 p.m. start and the nature of exhibition tickets, which frequently end up in the hands of people who paid little or nothing for admission. Without much of an investment in the product, and minimal meaningful action on the field, these patrons tend to arrive with other forms of entertainment on their itinerary.

So York asked the NFL to suspend the annual preseason meeting with the Raiders and promised to monitor who gets tickets. He did not see a need to move this Saturday's exhibition against the Texans up from its scheduled 5 p.m. start. Chief Suhr said he thinks day games create a tamer atmosphere but didn't quibble with the plans for this weekend.

"I'll be at the game myself," he said, "and I'm very much looking forward to it."

The chief put a little too much Chamber of Commerce sheen on his presentation, calling a 49ers game a family event, saying: "I encourage everyone to come out." But Suhr, who invited reporters to join him as he walked around the park Saturday, has boldly staked his reputation on the safety of NFL games in his backyard.

York's image is on the line, as well, but he tried to blur that line quite a bit on Monday.

Cost versus safety

While discussing the easily distractible preseason crowds and the resulting potential for rowdiness, he said: "This is one of the reasons why the NFL is looking at an 18 (regular season games) and 2 (preseason games) season as opposed to 16 and 4, because you just see a disinterest in the preseason. And the more disinterest you have, the more (you have) casual fans or attendees that aren't even fans in general, they're just looking for an entertainment and a place to go and start trouble."

He tried that reasoning twice on Monday, and both times, the remark clanged off the ear like a bad rim shot in basketball. The NFL could, in fact, stop forcing season-ticket holders to pay for all four exhibition games, essentially charging them for products they don't want. Fans then dump the tickets.

If the league sold them separately, at about $25 apiece, it would be a steep discount but still more than most people pay for the jettisoned tickets. The crowds would be there by choice, not default, and the decency factor would rise considerably. But NFL revenue would drop precipitously, so that reform will never be implemented. "Safety First" is never the same thing as "Safety at Any Cost."

York promised to urge season-ticket holders to be responsible about where they unload their preseason tickets. But will he revoke a ticket package from a paying customer who donated seats to a charity that ended up passing them along to people who passed them along to someone looking for a fight? Will he tell corporate backers, who sometimes buy up seats to help the team avert an NFL TV blackout, where they can distribute the tickets they purchased as a favor?

Declining behavior

Last year, the 49ers introduced a policy of revoking season tickets from recurring troublemakers. They needed to bump about 30 people, according to Jim Mercurio, vice president of stadium operations.

Why did they start last year? They had noticed declining behavior. Could that be because, as the team has faltered, so has the loyalty that prompted fans to treat their seats as family heirlooms and autumn Sundays as a chance to commune with fellow fans who became friends after years of occupying the same section?

It's been 17 years since the last championship season for the 49ers, but Suhr referred to the city's huge and safely euphoric celebrations of a team that won five Super Bowls in the '80s and '90s as if we still lived in that era. In more recent times, the city has seen two of its great events, Gay Pride weekend and Halloween in the Castro, marred by gunplay.

The chief said that those shootings could be explained as singular events, not necessarily connected to the celebrations, and that the city's homicide rate has dropped dramatically over the last three years, even as other communities have seen killings increase.

That is not entirely reassuring to someone like me, who was near the fatal shooting over 2010 Pride weekend and then heard about the five people wounded this year on Pink Saturday.

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